When I was in San Francisco during the 80s I was in my punk rock phase and my very favorite Thrift Store was a Purple Heart near Mission and Duboce. I found clothes to shred to go with my black leather jacket and Docs as well as jeans and clothes to wear to work.

I also had a Goodwill Store I liked.

Even then I sort of tried to avoid the Sallies… Part of growing up with labor pink diapers and a political education by Pete Seeger, The Weavers and Woody Guthrie. I always remember Joe Hill and the songs of the I.W.W. regarding the Salvation Army.

In LA I continued to patronize the Goodwill Stores and a chain called Out of the Closet which helped finance AIDS project LA.

So after I posted a thing last week about the Salvation Army I was wondering what I could find to balance it out.

Then I came across the following:

Goodwill thrives at San Francisco thrift store

So when a prime piece of commercial real estate languished vacant in the predominantly gay Castro district, activists and city officials saw an opportunity to put a dent in the problem. The result is the nation’s first Goodwill, and perhaps the first store of any kind, designed as a jobs program for workers whose genders are different from the ones they had at birth.

Seven of the shop’s nine employees are transgender, most of them women who used to be men. Like the donated merchandise they collect and sell, all are looking for new lives. They were referred to Goodwill by the Transgender Economic Empowerment Initiative, a nonprofit training and employment service that also places workers with Macy’s, Trader Joe’s, Bank of America and other supportive companies.

Since the late 1960s/early 1970s there has been a certain faction that has self defined as radical feminist/lesbian separatists that thrives on viciously attacking women born transsexual or transgender.

Since 1970 I have seen one sister in particular, Beth Elliott, bear the brunt of these episodic attacks of unmitigated hatred.

Beth is about the same age I am. We met on a couple of occasions in the early 1970s. My impression of her was that she looked like the typical hippie chick of that era, the same way I did.

Thus all the smears about some sort of exaggerated fembot presentation are pretty much lie based.

I share something else with Beth Elliott. At different times we both were part of the Lesbian Tide Collective. She was there at the beginning, I was there at the end.

It is to the credit of the other women of the Tide Collective that we were judged in a way that treated us like honest human beings. We were accepted as women, feminist and lesbians.

Yesterday I put up a post about transsexuals who hate other transsexuals and use the same sort of language used by BevJo, which is in turn the same language used by Porno Pete La Barbera and the rest of the Christo-Fascists so aptly labeled as hate groups by Southern Poverty Law Center.

Some of the strangest forms of attack upon Beth in the article referenced by Ms. Roberts, which may be read at: http://tinyurl.com/2d3lyoj are the physical appearance based ad hominems based on hair length and looking like heterosexual women are supposed to look. As an aside, when I moved to Texas I found my lesbian version of gaydar was thrown out of whack by meeting a lot of women who looked like stereotypical dykes but who were heterosexual women with ranches and horses.

While women like BevJo are a minority within the lesbian community their hatred has a corrosive effect on those sisters targeted.

For one thing it makes it hard for women whose lives have been impacted by transsexualism or transgenderism to be out and honest when doing so can result in brutal hate based attacks. Therefore when we work on feminist/lesbian issues we keep our mouths shut out of fear that simply saying transsexualism/transgenderism is also a feminist issue will cause us to be subjected to the same sort of brutal attacks we have seen others receive.

I have seen this as being part of the reason why those of us who were assigned male at birth and transition to female are treated with far more contempt and bigotry than those who were assigned female at birth and transition to male. Those who transition to male are seen as moving up the social ladder whereas those who transition to female are viewed as moving down that same social ladder.

There is no room in an absolutist male/female binary paradigm for those who are outside that paradigm. This is a position that is at odds with the idea of maleness and femaleness being a preponderance of traits that results in society treating a person in a manner that socializes them into approved masculine or feminine roles.

Prior to coming out and telling people I was transsexual I was chastised for physical traits and ways of acting that were deemed feminine. When I came out those same aspects of my being were reinforced in a positive manner and fear of being seen as feminine was replaced with fear of being seen as masculine.

This isn’t a novel observation. We observed it in our groups in the early 1970 and I heard the same thing in groups 30 years later. The more one is treated as a woman by society the more woman one becomes.

I honestly think that what bothers these “Radical Feminists” is the way in which we disturb their theological paradigm of there being some sort of total difference between men and women rather than a continuum.

There is no difference between these people and the Christo-fascists who attack LGBT/TQ people as well as oppress women.

They are radical in the same sense their spiritual kin the Klu Klux Klan and Aryan Nation are radical and they are wrong on every level.

Their very arguments display the depth of their errors of thinking. They so often double bind women with transsexualism or transgenderism.

If we like men our motivation for getting SRS is to slavishly serve them and to seduce unsuspecting men into having sex with us and turn them gay. We can do this because we have invisible magic male chromosomes that will some how turn these men gay. Or maybe it is because our sex parts were changed from male to female and still contain male cooties even though both male and female sex parts grow from the same set of cells depending on hormone levels and their interactions with genetic switches that guide development.

Men use the deception excuse as rational for murdering us. Even when they meet us in trans-bars that are clearly identified as such. Or in courtroom where we were called before a judge who used our birth name.

This is the same mindset that labels our boyfriends as gay even when our relationships are heterogendered and the pre-op sister has the same forms of non-vaginal sex with her partner that assigned female at birth women often use. Hormone shrunken parts or surgically reassigned parts must have magical powers if they can make a straight man gay.

But as I said one cannot win with bigots.

If one is influenced by the heterosexual socialization that is used to sell clothing and insecurity to heterosexual women then one is perpetuating stereotypes and acting as a tool of the patriarchy to oppress women.

If we like women our motivation for getting SRS is to seduce lesbians into having sex with us and rape them with our vaginas. Because if we can get them to have sex with us our magic invisible all powerful chromosomes will make them straight. Of course our only possible motivation for changing the sex we were assigned at birth is to act as tools of the patriarchy to seduce lesbians away from the path of true lesbianism with our all powerful chromosomal cooties.

Now here’s where it gets strange. If we dress like our heterosexual peers we are perpetuating sexist stereotypes. But if we dress and act just like our dyke peers we are somehow infiltrating them to pollute them.

I won’t respect this mindset by calling it transphobia. It is hatred and bigotry pure and simple.

It comes out of the same ideological mind set as racism and anti-Semitism. Or the Taliban Christian mind set that demonizes gay and lesbian people.

But I will go one step further.

Bigots like BevJo can rot in their own pool of puss and hateful venom…

I would rather be part of the general Left. A tree hugging dyke with another WBT life partner.

Together we support our causes which do not include dealing with people like BevJo.

Generally speaking this bigotry is somewhat anachronistic. As more and more TS/TG women and men have come out people have seen how we are as varied as cis-sex/gender folks.

Transsexual/transgender men and women are not the enemy. Many of us, perhaps more than the general population, support feminism, anti-racism and a variety of progressive causes. But like the general public some of us do not.

But the most ironic thing of all is how women like BevJo sound identical in their bigotry to a group one of the frequent commentators to this blog has labeled the “transsexual sisters of purity” i.e. the Classic Transsexual/HBS” set.

I guess that, in and of itself, is indicative of the class of criticism spewing forth from this self appointed set of “radical lesbian feminists”. They have achieved sameness with Christo-Fascists and self-hating transsexuals who have decided they are the only real transsexuals.

Even more interesting is how the biggest spewer of this bigotry on the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival Chat board (One Down) was exposed as having been born transsexual herself. She was using bigotry to throw suspicion away from herself.

I can only wonder how many of the other radical lesbian separatists are in fact using their bigoted rants to hide having been transsexuals themselves?

If the bullshit from the Classic Transsexual/HBS set is any indication I would bet there are more than a few.

I would also bet that like the loudest homo hating preachers are the most likely to be on the down low, that the loudest transsexual transgender hating people also have some secrets they are hiding.

Fiji Water announced today that it will close its operations in Fiji in response to a water extraction tax hike proposed by the Fijian government, to take effect in 2011. The abrupt shutdown comes just three days after the government announced the 2011 budget, which proposes increasing Fiji Water’s “extraction tax” to 15 cents a liter up from one-third of a cent.

Almost half of humanity could lose clean water access due to climate change, according to a British report to be released tomorrow ahead of an international climate change conference in Mexico.

“The main message is that the closer we get to a four-degree rise, the harder it will be to deal with the consequences,” Dr. Mark New, a climate expert at Oxford University, told The Observer.

The report will assume that global temperatures will rise 2 degree Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) this century even if nations agree to curb carbon emissions this year.

Climate change scientists believe that a mass global movement to “decarbonize” human activity in order to stay below this temperature is virtually impossible, especially after the UN climate talks in Copenhagen failed last December.

Climate change will cost a billion people their homes, says report

Devastating changes to sea levels, rainfall, water supplies, weather systems and crop yields are increasingly likely before the end of the century, scientists will warn tomorrow.

A special report, to be released at the start of climate negotiations in Cancún, Mexico, will reveal that up to a billion people face losing their homes in the next 90 years because of failures to agree curbs on carbon emissions.

Up to three billion people could lose access to clean water supplies because global temperatures cannot now be stopped from rising by 4C.

I feel very safe in predicting that the two classes of people The Greed Pigs and the rest of us will not suffer equally as we enter the era of population crash that will accompany the end of peak oil and adequate supplies of clean water.

Those with money will continue to thrive while whole lots of disposable people will not.

It isn’t just the corruption of the governments whose secrets are being exposed, if you can really call the petty school boy/girl sniping and bitchy cattiness secrets.

We learned that even the US will serve its masters the Saudis by providing the money, bodies and blood to act as the Hessians of the people we gave all that oil money to in order to tool around in gas guzzling SUVs.

And we thought we went into Iraq because Saddam Hussein was a nasty man.

But the fun doesn’t stop when you have a Danial Ellsberg or Julian Assange spilling the nasty thoughts of the powerful like Cassandra in truth telling mode.

The powerful use the governments but the real power is located on Wall Street and in the financial centers around the world.

Early next year, Julian Assange says, a major American bank will suddenly find itself turned inside out. Tens of thousands of its internal documents will be exposed on Wikileaks.org with no polite requests for executives’ response or other forewarnings. The data dump will lay bare the finance firm’s secrets on the Web for every customer, every competitor, every regulator to examine and pass judgment on.

(For the full transcript of Forbes’ interview with Assange click here.)

WASHINGTON — The heavy hitters of finance lost big battles earlier this year during the overhaul of financial regulation, but they’re working hard to win the war. They’re quietly trying to soften, if not kill, some of the more controversial provisions.

Lobbyists for Big Finance are working hardest to neutralize the so-called Volcker Rule, which would force big banks to spin off their lucrative proprietary trading operations, in which they invest their own capital in speculative deals.

The measure — named after its proponent, former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker — seeks to prevent big banks from betting against trades they made on behalf of their customers, a popular practice until the financial crisis exploded in 2008.

For example, big investment banks such as Goldman Sachs sold customers overvalued mortgage bonds even as they bet secretly that those bonds would default.

With transsexual and transgender people suffering unemployment and under-employment at a far higher rate than cis-sex/gender people in our same general class/race/educational demographic the failure to extend un-employment benefits is a major concern.

Time to stop focusing on our trans-centric navels and look at the bigger picture where we find ourselves having a lot in common with a huge number of other un-employed/under-employed people.

Aside from having to fight the anti-trans discrimination in a panopticon world where any employer willing to spend a hundred dollars can learn anything and everything about our lives, we live in a world where working people have gone from personnel to human resources. We are wetware. Disposable anytime an employer can find someone who will work cheaper and give blow jobs to boot.

At a time when real unemployment is in the 17%+ range and way higher for people saddled with a trans-prefixed word any place in their history it highly behooves us to pressure our congress people and Senators to extend unemployment benefits. We also need add all the other contributing factors such as age, age related disability, race, class to the soup. The result is that many are faced with unemployment insurance bridging the time gap until eligibility for Social Security benefits which are also facing a freeze in order to give the rich mother fucking elite bastards hundreds of thousands of dollars more that they can turn back into the Wall Street fraud machine.

WASHINGTON — Food banks across the country are watching for the end of federally-funded extended unemployment insurance.

“We are bracing for it,” said Vicki Escarra, CEO of Feeding America, the nation’s largest domestic hunger-relief charity, in an interview with HuffPost. Escarra said that Feeding America’s 200 member food banks across the country feed nearly six million people every week.

“I can assure you, if these unemployment insurance benefits are not reinstated we’ll see these numbers go way up,” Escarra said.

Two federal programs — Emergency Unemployment Compensation and Extended Benefits, which together provide up to 73 weeks of jobless aid on top of 26 weeks of state aid — are set to begin to expire this week because Congress has not reauthorized them. According to the Labor Department, two million long-term unemployed will be dropped from the programs by the end of December if Congress does not act.

Republican Mark Kirk, hours away from being sworn in as a US senator, said Monday that efforts to extend jobless benefits are misguided but argued it is imperative to extend Bush’s tax cuts for wealthy Americans.

On MSNBC’s Morning Joe Monday, Kirk said current proposals to extend unemployment benefits “take us into the direction of Greece and Ireland that are now imploding as economies.”

“We see overseas what happens when governments spend money they don’t have,” he added. “Proposals to extend unemployment insurance by just adding it to the deficit are misguided.”

The temporary extension of unemployment benefits are set to expire November 30th and nearly two million job-seeking Americans are expected to lose their benefits in December.

If no benefit extension is passed, an additional several hundred thousand unemployed workers are expected to lose their benefits every month thereafter.